One South African phrase has special significance for artist Liza Lou: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

It loosely translates to “a person is a person because of other people” or “I am because we are.”

“That’s a South African cliché in a lot of ways,” said Lou, who had just finished installing her remarkable “Color Field” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego downtown. “But it has great meaning in the sense we are all connected. You can’t do anything by yourself. I am because of other people.”

That’s the essence of “Color Field,” which Lou subtitled “All the Love in the World” during the three years she and Zulu artisans worked on the project in Lou’s studio in Durban, South Africa. Like most of her work, it comprises millions of beads, in this case organized into hundreds of squares of vivid colors.

“This project was about using all my material, all the people that I work with, to make some sort of generous object, something that belongs to everybody,” Lou said. “I couldn’t have made this on my own.”

Lou burst onto the international art scene in 1996 when her life-size “Kitchen” was shown as part of a group show, “A Labor of Love,” at the New Museum in New York City. Fame followed, as did fortune when she was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2002.

The money eventually allowed her to do something she had only imagined: to make a difference in a very specific, real-world way. She established a studio in Durban, an impoverished city in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, and became a significant source of employment for the locals who craft elements of her art work.

How many beads are in “Color Field”?

“It’s so embarrassing. I don’t really know,” said artist Liza Lou. But she knew the formula: Each wire has nine beads (think a blade of grass comprised of beads). Each “box” (the square tiles in which the wires are inserted) has 24 rows of 24 wires. And the entire installation has 520 boxes.

That’s 2,695,680 beads.

“It took me a couple years to get there, but (the MacArthur grant) did change my thinking,” Lou said. “I felt really responsible and beholden to do something and try to work in a different way.”

She initially planned to start a collective in India, but pursued a project in South Africa that she thought would be short-term.

“But I realized that wasn’t good enough,” she said. “What happens when you leave? Everyone is left in the lurch. So I just kind of kept the studio going. I call it home now. My life has totally changed.”

Material concerns

Although she executed “Kitchen” by herself, working alone in studios in Los Angeles and San Diego, in most of her subsequent art works she’s collaborated with others, whether studio assistants, graduate students (“people with degrees I don’t have”) or community members. But working in South Africa was different.

“In South Africa you are working with people who have a history with this material, who have grandmothers who taught them how to weave with beads when they were children,” she said. “So there’s this incredible history around the material.”

Zulu beadwork has a very specific set of conventions, even a kind of social code that certain patterns and colors communicate. While Lou has resisted the influence of the beadwork itself, she’s been moved by the Zulu attitude toward the process and especially the material, which has become increasingly important in her work.

“I have a reverence for the material in a way I never had before,” Lou said. “And I have an understanding of the kind of deeper place that art can have in the world.”

Although the material aspect of her earlier works was significant, it was still used in support of the work’s implied narrative or subtext (in the case of “Kitchen,” issues regarding values and women’s roles). But with her increasing attention to the material itself, her most recent works have tended toward abstraction, a move Lou insists is determined by the materials themselves.

“For this project, I kind of stood in my storeroom in Durban, where I have boxes teeming with beads,” she said. “I mean, boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes. And I said, ‘What do you want to be?’ That’s the question I asked.”

But there were other questions as well: “How do I keep everybody fed? How do I keep all these people working who need work? How do I keep making art when I’m not ready to make art, when I’d rather sit alone? How do I do that?

“So I’d start handing out these colors and people would take them home to the various townships and make these blades of grass (out of beads placed on a wire, which were later attached to squares). People would say, ‘What are we making?’ I don’t know. You tell me. Sometimes it’s truly an experiment.”

Craft considerations

Lou has been experimenting since the beginning, dropping out of the San Francisco Art Institute when she realized that she was spending most of her time doing what she would have been doing anyway — making art. And her fascination, even obsession, with beads didn’t sit well with her colleagues or the art establishment, who viewed what she did as dangerously close to craft.

“Craft is a sort of dirty word for a lot of people in the art world,” Lou said. “But I fully embrace that word. There’s no shame in craft; there’s tremendous beauty and dignity in craft. The fact that the art world has been so afraid of that word is something that is interesting to me, because I think that battle was fought and won in the ’60s, honestly.”

But the conflict quietly continues, and Lou finds her work is still occasionally misunderstood. But that’s a risk she’s willing to take.

“It’s really funny because we are so cynical now as viewers,” she said. “We live in a world of CGI (computer-generated imagery) and special effects and anything and everything can happen.

“We are truly desensitized to wonder. There is no sense of it anymore, and people are very suspicious of art. They often think, ‘That was just made in some sweatshop.’

“We devalue the human hand. It’s very cheap in people’s minds. They instantly think exploitation or something grotesque. We don’t tend to look at it as ‘people sat down and made this’ and what that actually means.”